Today on Stacking Growth, Meghan Bowen is back with Evan Kearsdale of Tech Impact. They go into detail on every aspect of building and growing a marketing agency in 2025 and beyond. They look at how marketing roles might change in 2026. How do we line marketing in sales?
How, when, and why to implement AI in your workflow? Making a talent destination? And more. Hope you Hey everybody, really excited for this chat today as we pop into CEO of Refine Labs.
The team shaking up how B2B companies think about marketing. Meghan, how are you? I'm doing great today. Thanks for having me Evan.
How are you? I'm well. Thanks so much for being here. One of my favorites online on social.
So I'm really excited for this chat before that. For those who aren't familiar with you and your work in Refine Labs, what's your elevator pitch exactly? Yeah, absolutely. I spent a 20-year career kind of growing up in the New York City startup scene at different B2B SaaS companies from Zoc Doc to Grubhub to manage by Q.
We work after being in it for 20 years. I saw all of the challenges that people have with GoToMarket. And so I said, I want to help as many companies as possible change the way that they measure and execute marketing. And so that's how Refine Labs was born back in 2019 and have been building the agency ever since.
We've worked with over 300 B2B SaaS and tech companies over that time frame to modernize their B2B growth strategy. Fantastic. And I love how you talk about what's broken in marketing, what works, what's next, how to fix it, all those good topics, maybe at a high level of start with breaking the old playbook, the old rule book. What's the biggest thing that B2B marketers do you think still get wrong?
The way I like to answer this question is to kind of describe an observation that we have noticed. One of the biggest changes that has happened over the last 30 years is the way that B2B buying and selling has dramatically shifted. Think about the 90s and what I call the analog era, when essentially the only way people could learn about new products and services was going to trade shows and conferences and talking with salespeople. The internet comes online, social media is born.
All of a sudden, I'll give a hub spot some credit. We have the whole concept of inbound marketing. So we have Google Ads and paid search and SEO. And now websites are your storefront and a primary way to deliver information.
And this is where digital marketing was born. And so this is where we see a lot of tactics that were super successful in the early 2000s, whether that was dating content, SEO practices, et cetera. We then have the rise of social media. And now people have access to even more information and even more opinions from their peers and colleagues.
And over the course of that time, what has happened is the power has shifted from the seller and the company to the buyer in terms of access to information, ability to get trusted recommendations from people that they know. And what has happened as a result is, I think the root cause of what's broken in terms of B2B go-to-market execution is that they are still operating under the presumption that the company and the seller has the power and not the buyer. And the way to think about shifting and evolving your approach and your tactics needs to be rooted in the fact that the power is in the buyer's hands and you need to craft a strategy that is rooted in how they're learning about products and services and making purchasing decisions. Oh, so well said.
And we're still clinging to a lot of old-fashioned ideas, concepts, modes of models. One of those you talk a lot about is the MQL model, the marketing qualified lead approach to measuring impact and success. Why is that not the correct approach and why do some of the companies still cling to the MQL philosophy? Yeah, and everybody in their mother defines MQL differently.
So in this context, a very common and traditional definition of MQL was essentially a contact, an email address, a person. And any way that I could get an email address, that was considered an MQL, regardless of buying intent. And so the way that I think that people need to be evolving their thinking about this is just because someone gave you their email address, because they downloaded a piece of content or because you scanned their badge at a conference, does not equate to intent to buy or to engage in a sales process or conversation. And so I think that the modern definition of an MQL needs to be both a person and contact information that is a firmographic fit with your ideal customer profile and some measurable and meaningful signal of buying intent.
Both of those together are required for it to be considered a real lead or an MQL from my perspective. And because of the shift in the power to the buyer, if companies assume that just because they have your contact information, that gives them the permission to reach out as often as possible and push for a meeting, it's going to actually impact your reputation in a negative way. And so the goal is, instead of focusing on just collecting as much contact emails as possible, how can you focus on creating more buying intent within your total addressable market and make the information about your products and services as easily accessible as possible so that when buyers are ready, they know you exist, they know how to self-serve, and they know how to come to you and raise their hand when they're ready for a sales conversation. Yeah, I think in B2B, it's never no, it's always sort of not now, I think is the way I think about it.
You also talk a lot about the notion of brand demand expand. It sounds intriguing. What does that mean in sort of plain English? Yeah, and it's clever and easy to remember.
And I don't claim that Refine Labs invented it. But the reason that we're talking about this system right now is because a lot of people have been, and I think with the AI hype, are losing sight of the critical importance of market fundamentals, marketing fundamentals. And so brand demand expand is intended to represent your entire go-to-market system. You need to have a strategy and tactics around creating awareness of who you are as a company and your products and services.
People need to know that you exist. Most buying decisions are based on companies that are able to get on what's called the day one consideration set list, which is when I have a problem, I already have a couple of companies in mind that could solve the problem because I am aware that they exist and aware of the solutions and they have and the problems that they solve. And so that's really what I would call brand marketing overall. Demand is intended to represent essentially how you convert interest and attention into sales conversations and customers.
And so there's a variety of tactics that you want to deploy, again, aligned to how buying is happening today that allows you to do that in a way that is buyer-centric. And expand is often not given enough attention to, especially in today's sort of B2B SaaS and tech landscape. And this is everything that happens after they become a customer. Digital marketing plays a role, sales plays a role, customer success, account management plays a role, and there needs to be explicit strategies on retaining and expanding current customers and also creating evangelists and advocates within your customer base that fuels word of mouth for more net new customer acquisition.
So brand demand expand is intended to represent the three core pillars of a highly effective and efficient go to market engine. And people need to be thinking about a more holistic strategy overall that includes aspects of all three of those pillars. Fantastic. Now you have a unique approach to onboarding new clients.
Tell us about what you when you work with new clients, what's the first sort of aha moment for them in your approach, your team approach? Yeah, we have a very rigorous and extended onboarding phase with clients because what we believe is in order to be a strong growth partner to a company, you have to deeply understand their business. And it's not just about taking over their paid advertising programs or their content programs. So what we do is a deep dive into their trailing four to eight quarters revenue performance, everything from lead sources to conversion rates across the funnel to closed one, closed lost analyses.
What we want to be able to do is identify really critical insights. So for example, things like who are actually becoming customers and who are not becoming customers? How are they learning about the company? What are these key milestones in the buying journey that we are able to capture and measure, you know, asterisk, you can't measure everything and that's not the point.
And what can we learn based on the trends over the last two years of what's been working, what's not working, where are there opportunities and levers to improve either quality, quantity or conversion rates across the funnel. And this is in combination with, you know, thinking and auditing everything from, you know, the creative ads in market, the content strategy, the organic social strategy, the website and putting together a holistic and comprehensive roadmap of everything that needs to be addressed in priority order to get to a point where we can meaningfully impact the overall business results. For 95% of our customers, we've been able to drive a 50% increase to qualified pipeline production within eight months of working together. And that's the repeatable process that we've been able to drive is really rooted in all of the work that we're doing up front to really understand the business.
It's not about taking our playbook and applying it blindly to every company. That's not how that's not how growth works. And so that approach has served us and our clients well in terms of improving overall business results. Really into the blockbuster approach.
Of course, we have to talk AI these days. How do you think AI is changing the way, you know, tech marketing teams operate and how's it changing the way you operate? Yeah, it's a great question. It is the hot topic right now.
I think, you know, a lot of people are really excited about the technology, which is totally understandable. But I think in that excitement are often jumping to specific tools or, you know, shiny new use cases that may or may not be relevant or rooted in their actual overall strategy. And so, you know, I think that's kind of the fun and the tempting way to go. I certainly understand it, but I'm not sure that that is ultimately the most productive way to focus in terms of impacting business results.
When we think about AI at Refine Labs, we know just like over the last 30 years, as we have moved from the analog era to the website era to the dark social era, we're now in the AI era. So one of the things that we have really wrapped our arms around is how is buying and selling changing in the AI era? And how can we leverage AI to provide a competitive advantage to our customers? And so our approach is we have essentially three pillars to our AI strategy at Refine Labs.
Number one is AI powered benchmarks. So we've worked with over 300 B2B SAS companies in the last six years. The amount of data that we have access to in terms of what works, what doesn't work benchmarks across creative media performance, funnel analysis, we're able to provide clients with measurable results of what good looks like. And we can benchmark their progress against that and help them identify what's underperforming, where they may be overspending the areas of their funnel that require the most improvement.
And a lot of people don't have access to the data set that we have. And so because of that first party data that we have, we're excited to turn that into something that's extremely useful to our customers. The second piece is obviously AI is powerful in terms of automation and streamlining workflows. So of course, we want to leverage that to unlock strategic focus.
So in terms of everything from paid media operations and reporting, we're trying this out on ourselves first and leveraging tools and automation to allow us to focus even more time on strategic recommendations. And then lastly, this has always been our ethos as Refine Labs, if you will, experimentation. And so we are constantly running structured experiments across our active client portfolio today to try to identify where does AI actually create a real lift and go to market strategy and execution, not using the tool for the sake of using the tool. But where are we able to actually say, here's a really legitimate use case for this particular tool in this aspect of your strategy, where we actually see it driving an improvement to business results.
And so our focus is to lead the experimentation effort. And then once we find something that works, document that insight and turn it into a repeatable framework that our clients can apply with confidence. Fantastic. And speaking of results, revenue sales, always a good thing.
I actually came up on the sales side, not in marketing, so 30 years in tech sales. And marketing was always that other department. We sat in separate parts of the building, you know, occasionally got together. But definitely siloed.
What's your take on how marketing and sales should really work together, ideally in 2025? Yeah, it's a great question. I think that it really comes down to, I think, three core areas. And so one is goals and incentives.
I think one of the root causes why there can be finger pointing or tension between marketing and sales is because often their goals and their incentives are not aligned. It's crazy to me how in some organizations, a marketing team can hit their MQL goal, but the sales team misses the revenue goal. That doesn't really make sense, right? And so shared goals and incentives around pipeline and revenue is crucial for those teams to be incentivized to collaborate effectively together.
The second is clarity on who we're trying to acquire. And so I'm a big believer in creating the list. You have a, you know, typically a definition of your ideal customer profile or your total addressable market, but make the list, who are the companies that you want to be customers and have both marketing and sales going after the same list of companies. And then lastly, it comes down to communication and collaboration.
There needs to be explicit operating rhythms between the teams to create empathy, to create appropriate collaboration. A great use case that I love is marketing, listening to sales calls on a regular basis and learning what prospects are actually saying in the sales process and leveraging those insights for marketing strategies. And there's so many other use cases like that when you really create the right operating rhythms for those teams to be interacting and collaborating and communicating on a regular basis. Very cool.
So we're in this era of doing more with less budgets, our tightening, even in big tech, we're seeing downsizing and layoffs. I think marketing is being hit particularly hard with some of the content creation tools impacting employees to your employees in particular. But what's one area you would suggest CMOs not cut? Yeah, it's interesting how the content roles were sort of on the chopping block first.
And then I don't know if you've seen some of these really interesting job descriptions published by large companies looking for, you know, ahead of CEO content and paying, you know, multiple six figures for these roles. And so the problem is if everyone outsource their content production to AI, it all looks the same. There's no differentiation and the content strategy loses its efficacy completely. And so not to say there is absolutely a role for AI and content development.
But unfortunately, what's happening is people are outsourcing the most important thing to it today, which is original thinking and creativity. And so I actually believe that marketing roles will undergo a transformation. But I think you're going to need the same types of roles across all marketing disciplines. The role is just going to evolve and focus more on creativity, strategy, human judgment, and the ability to leverage AI tooling effectively, right?
And you know, I think we will see leaner teams in the future than we have in the past. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed. You build something at Refine Labs called the vault.
So to build as a cheat code for faster results, sounds very mysterious. What is it? How does it work? Yeah, the vault is essentially our intellectual property content warehouse.
And so over the last six years, we've been publishing all of our frameworks and benchmarks, our strategies, templates, resources, you know, playbooks. And essentially, it allows people to get access to that without hiring us as their agency of record and learn and leverage what we've published in their own marketing strategy. So it's essentially access to everything that you would need to know to modernize your B2B growth strategy on your own. We also have a community within Slack.
And so, in addition to access to all the information, there's a forum to ask questions, to get input and feedback, discuss topics with other marketers. And it's been really great for all of our customers, but also for people that may not be in a position to hire us as their agency, but want to benefit from, you know, a lot of the work that we published that has really helped all the clients that we've served. Well done. So following you and your team on LinkedIn, you seem to really enjoy marketing, you and the team.
They say culture needs strategy for breakfast. So you clearly have a unique culture. How did you pull that off? Well, how did you build such a fun organization?
Yeah, it's a great, great question. And so I, you know, I had really two goals when I built Refine Labs. The first was wanting to change the way B2B companies measure and execute marketing, right? And the second though, was to build what I call a talent destination.
I wanted to create a company that was operating under a different principle. And so a lot of companies operate essentially in the profits first mentality. We make decisions that benefit shareholders, and then we might think about our customers, and then we might think about our employees. And I basically have a hypothesis that if you flip that completely on its head, that you're, you'll actually be able to drive even better business outcomes.
What if we thought about our people first, and then our customers, and then the shareholders were the third priority on the list. And what type of company could you build if you made decisions through that lens? And what I found is that being able to, you know, it doesn't discount the ability of building a profitable business and making sure that you have sound unit economics. Like, obviously, that's important.
But when making big decisions and deciding how you're going to set your values and build your culture, what I have found is I've been experimenting with this approach is that it creates a level of engagement and commitment that I haven't seen in other environments. And that one way that's manifested is we have a huge percentage of our team that's very active on LinkedIn talking about all of the work that we're doing with our clients. We have people that have come into our organization are now VPs of marketing, CMOs, entrepreneurs. I am constantly being told by people that if they worked at Refine Labs is on their resume, they want them in their organization because of the reputation that we've built.
And so what it's about is how can I create the conditions for team members to do the best work of their lives and have a platform to, you know, expedite their own professional development. And when you do that for people, they essentially want to reciprocate in kind and it results in exceptional work, exceptional commitment, excitement to be publicly talking about all of the work that we're doing at the agency. Amazing. Well done.
So looking ahead a couple of years, I won't ask you longer than that because who knows what excites you most about the to be content marketing and marketing in general. Yeah, I think what I was talking through earlier in terms of how we're developing our AI strategy. I think really seeing all three of those pillars come to life. Very excited about that.
You know, the agency landscape is changing a lot as well. And we're in a position now after some investment from Brandon Holdings where we're actually looking to acquire some other agencies to expand our service portfolio and our footprint. And so there's a lot of really exciting things on the roadmap while always making sure that we are staying focused on delivering results for our clients, of course, really, where fantastic to catch up. You're delivering results every day.
It's so fascinating to watch your journey. And thanks for being on the show and on techinfact.tv where you join us a couple weeks back. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Evan.
Thanks so much. And thanks everyone for listening, sharing this episode. Take care. Thanks again.